My husband, Bob, has what you might call an allergy to doctors. “I used to measure my health each year by whether I could run the nearly 7.5-mile San Francisco Bay to Breakers race in under an hour,” he says.

So it was on a summer day in 2012 that I had to practically chase my 58-year-old spouse out of the house for a long-overdue physical exam I’d booked for him. (I’d set up my annual physical, complete with mammogram, for the same day.)

What precipitated the doctor visit for Bob was not a symptom — he was perfectly healthy — but rather a vague worry I’d been feeling ever since a good friend of ours was diagnosed with prostate cancer (out of the blue) a few months earlier. And I learned from just the briefest online search that Bob was nearing the age when prostate cancer surges. Dr. Patrick Walsh of Johns Hopkins University, considered one of the world’s foremost authorities on the disease, writes, “After age 60, prostate cancer seems to shift into high gear — and a man is three times more likely to develop it than a woman is to develop breast cancer.”

The American Cancer Society estimates that 232,570 women will be diagnosed with invasive breast cancer this year. The prostate cancer number is almost the same, 233,000. Still, our awareness of the two is not at all equal. October, with its ubiquitous pink ribbons, has come to symbolize breast cancer awareness. Buildings across America, even the White House, light up in pink. NFL players, the epitome of male power and strength, sport the ribbon and don pink accessories to raise awareness. I’m guessing you didn’t know that September has a ribbon too — a little-seen light-blue ribbon that is the sign of Prostate Cancer Awareness Month. I certainly didn’t. But my understanding of the disease was about to grow exponentially.

You may well ask why planning the checkup had fallen to me, but it’s actually quite common for a wife to take on the role of health cop for her family. According to Gary Brice, executive director of the DeGraff Memorial Hospital McLaughlin Center in North Tonawanda, New York, most men don’t like to show weakness and most women “don’t have trouble admitting health problems.” He explains that women are also more familiar with healthcare in general after years of having pelvic examinations, as well as taking children to the pediatrician.

If distrust of doctors was a constant for Bob, he’d reinvented nearly everything else about himself about 10 years earlier. “At 50 everything changed in my life,” he says. At the time, the two of us moved from California to the East Coast after I accepted a promotion (I work in newspaper sales and marketing). For Bob, the move meant leaving behind a 30-year career in automotive service and going back to school. “I didn’t have the opportunity to finish college, so I went back and became the oldest kid in my class.” By 2012, Bob was in his personal prime time and working in real estate.

ON THE MORNING OF THE APPOINTMENT, I REMINDED BOB to be sure to ask for his prostate-specific antigen (PSA) level to be checked as part of the blood work the doctor would order. PSA is an enzyme made by the prostate and an elevated level is considered one of the most useful serum tumor markers for any malignancy. In fact, the majority of prostate cancers are found through the PSA test, not the dreaded digital rectal exam.

Funny thing about the PSA. Recommendations from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) urge primary caregivers against using this test. The argument is that PSA tests can give a false positive or detect slow-growing cancers that are unlikely to cause a problem during a patient’s lifetime. Treating these cancers can do more harm than good, argues USPSTF Chair Dr. Michael LeFevre.

Sure enough, his doctor had no plans to offer the PSA test because Bob had no family history of prostate cancer and there was nothing of note on the digital exam. But Bob insisted. “You don’t know my wife,” he said. The doctor reluctantly checked the box on the blood work order.

Much to the doctor’s surprise, Bob’s blood test showed an elevated PSA level. The doctor downplayed it as a likely false positive, and Bob didn’t even bother to tell me about it. “I didn’t want to scare you,” he says.

The doctor ordered a second test. The results were the same, and Bob was referred to a urologist for further evaluation. “I was still in denial even after the second PSA test,” he admits.

Turns out, that’s a common reaction, but at least this time he told me about it. “Research shows that many men do not get tested for prostate cancer, because they fear the effects of surgery they may not even need,” Dr. Drew Pinsky, the popular HLN host and himself a prostate cancer survivor, writes on his blog. “What concerns many males faced with prostate cancer is not the cancer itself, but possible incontinence, and [loss of] sex.”

The urologist performed a biopsy, where tissue samples of the prostate gland and the surrounding area were taken using a needle inserted through the wall of the rectum. He warned Bob that there could be complications from a prostate biopsy such as infection and excess bleeding. But the 30-minute procedure went without incident and Bob experienced very little pain. “It was exactly as the doctor described. And I had no issues afterward. I drove myself home,” Bob recalls.

A few days later, on my husband’s 59th birthday, we received the results, and the news was devastating. Not only were there moderately aggressive cancer cells concentrated on one side of Bob’s prostate, there were also cancer cells in areas outside of the gland. With evidence that the cancer had escaped the prostate, the urologist ordered a CT scan and a bone scan to see whether Bob’s cancer had spread even farther. The sentence spoken by the urologist on that fateful day woke me up to the serious situation we were facing: “There is no known cure for prostate cancer that has spread to other parts of the body.”

No known cure. Three of the most terrifying words I have ever heard. But it was almost worse when my ever-optimistic, upbeat husband confided to me, “I think we are in trouble.”

]]>http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/08/29/in-the-magazine/features/in-sickness-and-in-health.html/feed8Should You Sue?http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/08/29/in-the-magazine/features/should-you-sue.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/08/29/in-the-magazine/features/should-you-sue.html#commentsFri, 29 Aug 2014 13:00:19 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=100636When wronged, you have the right to sue. But in today's strained judicial system, mediation may offer a quicker, cheaper, and more satisfying result

Should you sue? When wronged, you have the right to sue. But in today’s strained judicial system, mediation may offer a quicker, cheaper, and more satisfying result. (Illustration by Serge Bloch)

As Americans, we believe in justice. In the Pledge of Allegiance, we ratify that there should be “justice for all.” Our courts act as a guardian and interpreter of the Constitution and of our laws. Our judges and juries help keep our streets safe, our property secure, and our freedom intact.

Courts are also used to settle private disputes. And, because the right to a day in court is so important, America opens this opportunity to everyone. The courts charge modest filing fees but do not otherwise charge litigants to use its judges, personnel, and buildings. A filing fee of $250 does not come close to fully paying for the court to hear a case. The annual cost to the U.S. economy from civil litigation is estimated at $233 billion.

The ease of access to the courthouse enables our judicial system to provide a service that our public uses — often. More than 15 million civil lawsuits are filed every year in America, and that’s causing a strain on the judicial system.

And, despite the fact that the government subsidizes the costs of the courtroom itself, bringing a suit is a terrifically expensive endeavor. Lawyers typically spend hundreds or even thousands of hours by the time a case reaches the decision stage. An average civil case, start to finish, can cost each side to the controversy in excess of $100,000. For business disputes, the amount is frequently in the millions. Little wonder that it is said that litigation is a rich person’s game.

In one of the more colorful examples of what a win looks like, consider Buchwald v. Paramount, in which writer Art Buchwald and his partner Alan Bernheim sued Paramount Pictures over the 1988 Eddie Murphy movie, Coming to America. Buchwald and Bernheim claimed the story was their idea (a few years prior to the film’s release, they’d sent Paramount a treatment for a similar concept) and filed suit, asking for $6.2 million. After lengthy litigation, they were awarded $900,000. That sounds like a lot of money, but when all was said and done, they’d spent more than $2 million in legal fees.

Fortunately, there is an alternative to litigation, an option too few of us think about when we feel we’ve been wronged: mediation. Throughout the United States, pioneering lawyers, clients, and others are discovering that they can utilize the objective standards set and safeguarded by the courts without always having to suffer the risk, expense, time, and aggravation of litigating. Mediation is an effective and creative way to satisfy our interests. Sometimes, it can work even better than litigation.

Fortunately, there is an alternative to litigation, an option too few of us think about when we feel we’ve been wronged: mediation. Throughout the United States, pioneering lawyers, clients, and others are discovering that they can utilize the objective standards set and safeguarded by the courts without always having to suffer the risk, expense, time, and aggravation of litigating. Mediation is an effective and creative way to satisfy our interests. Sometimes, it can work even better than litigation.

Even though the results of litigation are uncertain, the right to start a lawsuit or defend yourself in court is vital to the very notion of due process under the law. But the sheer volume of lawsuits is threatening to undermine that right. In today’s climate of austerity, courts have not been able to hire needed judges to manage the extra workload. Simultaneously courts have been required to reduce hours of operation and lay off vital staff — even as record numbers of lawsuits continue to be filed. In January of this year, the 9,000-member New York County Lawyers’ Association (NYCLA) issued a report, “Courts in Crisis,” which warned that courts in the New York region were “dangerously close to the point where they cannot meet their constitutional and statutory duties.” Similar conditions exist nationwide. In some jurisdictions, you must wait months or even years to have your case heard.

As mentioned above, litigation is costly, but not just as measured in dollars. The lawyer does not do all the work. Clients must support the lawyer in presenting the facts, documents, and other considerations to the lawyer and to the judge and jury. Clients make frequent trips to lawyers’ offices and spend much time thinking — even obsessing — about their matters, frequently at the expense of other business, personal, and family matters.

A further aggravation is the frequent delays. It is said that “justice delayed is justice denied.” But as the NYCLA report found, delays are now routine due to hiring freezes, reduced court hours, and hang-ups at every stage of court proceedings, including “delays in obtaining files … , delays in trials, delays in motion practice, delays in obtaining decisions, and delays in the processing of papers.”

Additionally when all is said and done litigation is risky. Only 50 percent of parties can be successful. Put another way, if 15 million cases a year in the United States go to trial, each year there will be at least 15 million losers.

Despite the financial and opportunity costs, the delays, the aggravation, and the risks, clients frequently tell their lawyers, “At least I’ll have my day in court.” Ah, if only that were the case. More than 90 percent of cases settle before they go to trial — more often than not they settle “on the courthouse steps,” that is, shortly before trial. In those cases, clients will have already paid for much of the preparation, and have already endured the aggravations and delays associated with preparing for a trial.

So, why sue? When you tally up the costs, it frequently doesn’t make sense. Buchwald realized his mistake, but only after the ordeal was over. “When I got involved, I expected to be in a business dispute that I assumed would be resolved early in the game for a minimal sum of money and hopefully an apology,” he wrote. “One of the discoveries of a suit such as this is that it makes you hurt deeply, and you don’t forgive easily. [Another thing I discovered:] Do not count on any money in a lawsuit — this is as true if you win as if you lose.”

]]>http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/08/29/in-the-magazine/features/should-you-sue.html/feed0Are We Losing the Stars?http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/08/29/in-the-magazine/features/light-pollution.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/08/29/in-the-magazine/features/light-pollution.html#commentsFri, 29 Aug 2014 13:00:10 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=100632An astronomer draws attention to the rising threat of light pollution with the help of the U.S. National Park Service and brilliant night-sky photography

Lights out: A starry evening at Acadia National Park on Mt. Desert Island, Maine. Many visit by day; few see its full glory at night, notes astronomer Tyler Nordgren. (Tyler Nordgren)

“If you see a car along that road,” Tyler Nordgren warned me, “don’t look at the headlights. It’ll ruin your night vision for two hours.” Nordgren and I had pitched our tents under the brow of Mount Whitney in the Alabama Hills, a field of boulders near Death Valley. We watched it get dark, and in the nighttime horizon, the sky was perforated by stars and streaked by the Milky Way. Or, to put it in approximate scientific terms, it was probably a class 3 on the Bortle Dark-Sky Scale, the 9-level numeric metric of night sky brightness.

Even so, we could still see domes of hazy light from 200-odd miles south in Los Angeles and 250 miles east in Las Vegas. That encroaching urban glow was like highlighter calling attention to the issue that Nordgren, a prophet whose cause is light pollution, wanted to illustrate for me.

“We’re losing the stars,” the 45-year-old astronomer said. “Think about it this way: For 4.5 billion years, Earth has been a planet with a day and a night. Since the electric light bulb was invented, we’ve progressively lit up the night, and have gotten rid of it. Now 99 percent of the [continental U.S.] population lives under skies filled with light pollution.”

Nordgren is an affable, engaging, and quotable Cassandra, an enthusiastic and patient teacher who loves his subject and wants you to love it, too. Those attributes, along with his book for a lay audience, Stars Above, Earth Below: A Guide to Astronomy in the National Parks, have pushed him to center stage of a small but impassioned movement to preserve natural night skies. When he is not lecturing at the University of Redlands, a California liberal arts college, Nordgren is a much sought-after itinerant preacher intent on bringing people revelation of the stars they have, almost everywhere, lost sight of.

Almost the entire eastern half of the United States, the West Coast, and almost every place with an airport large enough to receive commercial jets are too lit up to get a good view of stars. The phenomenon is illustrated by the first World Atlas of artificial night sky brightness. Based on spacecraft images of Earth in 1996-97, it shows a spectrum from black, representing the natural night sky, to pink, in which artificial light effectively erases any view of the stars at all. Green is where you lose visibility of the Milky Way. The map of the contiguous 48 states — and much of Europe — looks like a video-game screen showing a carpet bombing, the map a splash of green, yellow, red, and pink.

For roughly the past two decades, at least two-thirds of the U.S. population have not been able to see the Milky Way at all, and it will get worse before it gets better. …

For more beautiful night-sky photography and to find out how astronomer Tyler Nordgren is raising awareness of our disappearing stars, pick up the September/October 2014 issue of The Saturday Evening Post on newsstands or …

Purchase the digital edition for your iPad, Nook, or Android tablet:

To purchase a subscription to the print edition of The Saturday Evening Post:

Jay Leno loves making people laugh and he loves cars. Those passions have shaped his life. After 22 years as host of The Tonight Show, he stepped down earlier this year but he’s working as hard as ever. When he isn’t traveling the globe performing stand-up gigs from Detroit to London and Rome, you can find him in his garage in North Hollywood getting hands-on with a multi-million-dollar array of perfectly maintained classic automobiles.

Leno’s affection for his four-wheeled collection — not to mention dozens of motorcycles — is on display every week in his hit Web series, Jay Leno’s Garage (nbc.com/jay-lenos-garage), on a YouTube channel that boasts nearly 1 million subscribers and draws 5 million views each month. Clad in his trademark denim shirt and jeans, Jay Leno drops one-liners on the series, but he also gets serious about his collection — whether he’s restoring a vintage Bentley, tooling down the highway in a classic Mustang convertible, or taking a souped-up Ferrari to the limit on a test track. He may be a famous face but that doesn’t keep him from rolling up his sleeves and going under the hood.

If you think driving around in one of his ultra-expensive supercars is an ego trip for Leno, you’ll be surprised to know him as I have. He’s among the least affected and most genuine celebrities in a town where the pursuit of fame can become toxic. If a kid happens to admire the Lamborghini Diablo Leno chose to drive for the day, Jay might just invite the kid to sit in the driver’s seat — with the car parked, of course. Whether it’s a car buff or a fan looking for an autograph, Jay takes time to chat.

His love affair with cars still takes a backseat to the real love of his life. Leno and his wife, Mavis, have been married for 34 years. What’s kept them together? Jay jokes, “Opposites attract. And when I come home late from the garage smelling of brake fluid, she knows where I’ve been.”

Leno was a high school kid in his hometown, Andover, Massachusetts, flipping hamburgers at McDonald’s where he won first prize performing a comedy routine for the restaurant’s talent show. Later, he moved to Boston, worked at Foreign Motors car dealership, and dreamed of owning his first set of wheels before eventually embarking on a career as a stand-up comic. After years on the comedy circuit, he snared the brass ring in 1992 when hired to replace retiring late-night host Johnny Carson of The Tonight Show. Ratings success brought him big bucks, millions of fans, and a range of awards.

Now, Jay is adding one more trophy to the shelf. He’ll be the first top-rated late-night TV host to receive the coveted Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, joining such past honorees as Richard Pryor, Carol Burnett, and Bill Cosby. “I’m a big fan of Mark Twain,” he deadpanned. “A Tale of Two Cities is one of my favorite books.” (The event takes place at the Kennedy Center on October 19.)

We sat down on stools in the kitchen area of Leno’s impressive garage. The sound of motors being tested was background music.

Jay Leno: The cool thing about the website is that it goes around the world. I guess my favorite part is that people get to see cars in motion. In car magazines you just see still pictures. Also, I’m not competing with something I’ve already done. No sitting behind a desk.

JW: And you’ve got a lot of viewers.

JL: It’s done quite well actually, and I’m thrilled with that — especially considering that it is all sort of word of mouth.

JW: Is love affair too strong an expression to use about America and cars?

JL: It’s a lot different than it used to be. I think the love affair is sort of over. When I was a kid in the ’60s and ’70s, car culture was pretty much what social media is now. You had songs like “Little GTO” and “Hey, Little Cobra” and “409.” Nobody sings about cars anymore. I was born the day I got my driver’s license.

JW: What was that day like?

JL: Your dad would teach you to drive. And, then, on your 16th birthday, you’d get your license, and you take your mom’s car out and try to go 100. I remember I was in my mom’s Falcon doing 96 … 97 … 98 – just barely trying to break it. I don’t think kids do that anymore. Now when kids want to get away, they can Skype in their room and see things they’re not supposed to see. When we were kids you physically had to leave your house, and the car was what took you to where the girls were or where things were going on or where the hangout was. In a lot of ways, the iPhone and social media have replaced the car. So I think that the love affair has dwindled but the hard-core romantics will keep it going.

JW: So you’re a hard-core car romantic?

JL: I like what it represents. The automobile is a piece of industrial history in America. It’s had a huge effect on our lives. When Henry Ford created the Model T, it was sort of the iPhone of the day. Before that cars were really just a plaything for the rich. When you buy an old car and fix it up and you drive it, there’s a bit more pride because you know what it took to get it running. That’s part of the romance. Modern cars are harder to bond with because they don’t break down. I’d say the American car dream is still around, but it’s not as big a deal.

JW: What was the first car that you owned?

JL: It was a ’34 Ford pickup truck. I got it when I was 14. We had a 300-foot driveway, and I would just drive up and down the driveway for hours at a time. When I got it, it didn’t run. My dad said if I could fix it then it’d be my car. You sort of learned to respect the machine and how to make it work. That’s probably what really got me into cars. And that’s what has kept me involved in creating my own collection and building the garage.

JW: When you were doing well and you could pick any car you wanted, did you buy something high-end?

JL: I never really bought any luxury cars when I first became successful. I got cars that I liked. The first real luxury car I bought was for my dad. I always told him that when I made it big I’d get him a Cadillac. So I took him down to Woodworth Motors in Andover, Massachusetts. My dad being Italian sees this big white Cadillac with red velour upholstery and, of course, he wanted that. So I buy him this ridiculous, garish white Cadillac, and my mother was embarrassed to ride in it. When they were driving down the street she would sit in the passenger seat, and if they pulled up to another car and people would look at it, she would motion them to roll down the window and say, “We’re not really Cadillac people. Our son got us this.” It was hilarious.

JW: What was the first expensive car that you bought for yourself because you really wanted it?

JL: I got a 1954 Jaguar XK120. There was a reason. When I was 9 years old, I was riding my bicycle in our town — where nobody had fancy cars — and I saw a man drive a 1951 Jaguar XK120 out of a barn. It was a little two-seater roadster, and I was mesmerized. He called me over — Don Milligan is his name — and asked if I’d like to sit in it, and I said sure. The car is parked in the same barn as it was in 1959. He still owns it.

JW: Is it a good day when you’re sitting in this huge garage tinkering with a car or trying to get it to run better?

JL: I love the challenge. That’s what we’re doing with that steam car over there. The gray and red one is called a Doble steam car. It was driven by Howard Hughes. We’ve been trying to get it up and running. The metal is 100 years old and things crack, so it takes a lot of work.

JW: How did you find that car?

JL: Old cars find you. I get letters every week from guys in their 70s, 80s, 90s who say, “Oh, I’ve had this car all my life. I don’t have any kids. I want it to go to a good home.” I always promise them that I’ll never sell it, which I don’t. That’s actually how I’ve acquired most of these cars, and they all have some sort of fascinating story behind them.

JW: How many cars do you have in here?

JL: I think about 128 and 93 motorcycles. Something like that.

JW: Do any new cars capture your fancy?

JL: Oh, very much so! I like the technology. I’ve got a Chevy Volt in here. I’m interested in some of the hybrid stuff that’s happening. Cars used to get 8 miles per gallon. Now they have three times the horsepower, and they’re getting 30 or 40 miles per gallon. The auto industry is still innovative. All of a sudden you’ve got the Tesla. When electric cars first came out they were slow, but they got pretty good mileage. Now you have the Tesla, which is electric and sexy and fast and luxurious. It has all the benefits of the gas car without a lot of the drawbacks. So, once again, engineers are making new things work.

JW: How about driverless cars?

JL: I’m not against them. I see driverless cars now — only people are at the wheel. They’re texting or talking or doing their makeup, or a guy is combing his hair. At least if a computer is driving it’s paying attention. I would rather have a computer driving than those idiots I see out on the freeway who think driving is so boring they’re doing something else.

JW: Don’t you want to share your love of cars with the younger generation even if they are into social media?

JL: I meet kids that remind me of myself when I was 15 or 16. Every now and then I’ll get a letter from one saying they’d love to ride in a certain car, so I invite them over and we go for a drive. I like to let kids sit in a car and grab the steering wheel and kind of feel what it’s like. I remember when I picked up my McLaren, there were two kids at the dealership just watching us. I invited them in, and they took pictures and sat in the car. They’ll remember that their whole lives the way
I remember Don Milligan for letting me sit in his Jaguar when I was 9.

JW: How do you pick which car to drive from this huge collection?

JL: It’s generally whatever I’ve been working on that day. You say, “Oh, that one’s fixed?” Then you test it, and hope it will hold up. When you deal with cars – and many of these cars are well-over 100 years old – something is always breaking. To me, how I get there is always way more important than where I’m going.

JW: A lot of people remember a car as the first place that they got to make out. Did you have any four-wheel romances?

JL: My wife, Mavis, and I did get romantic in my ’55 Buick that I still have next door. So on our 25th anniversary we took the car out and went back to that place where we had parked. There are a million houses there now, so we ended up in someone’s driveway around midnight. Then, of course, it was “Ow! My hair!” And I accidentally hit the horn. Of course. The light comes on on the porch, and a guy comes out. We were more successful the first time, but the basic idea was there.

JL: One holiday we go down to buy a Christmas tree. It was some ridiculous price, and I complained to the guy, but he said it was free delivery. I said, “OK. Fine.” So I buy it, and he asked me where I live. I told him Beverly Hills and gave the address, and he says, “Oh. That’s two miles out of the delivery zone. It’s gonna be an extra $50.” I was so mad. So I told him to wait. I went to the Chevy dealer across the street and bought a truck on the spot, brought it over, put the tree in the back, and drove it home. I still have the truck. That was the last time I did something that stupid.

JW: As a celebrity, do you always get great service from the valet?

JL: I hate valet parking. I’ll always look for a place on the street. You ever read the back of a valet ticket? No responsibility for damage. And if your car is stolen, the police don’t look for it for 30 days because you voluntarily gave the key to someone else!

JW: We’re all wondering what you’re gonna do next.

JL: I’m doing what I like. I like being a comic. I like going on the road. It’s kind of fun now that I’m not on TV. People don’t see you everyday. I might do something on TV — I don’t know what. I’m not gonna do another late-night show or something like that.

JW: Does it feel different?

JL: I know that some people when they leave a TV show they don’t have a table at a certain restaurant or whatever, but nothing has changed for me. It’s not like I’ve lost all these perks that went with being the star on a TV show.

JW: People wonder why you don’t seem to get angry or you aren’t meaner. You really seem to be a nice guy.

JL: There’s enough meanness. I mean when I look at TMZ and I see celebrities having feuds and it’s just “Eff you,” “No, eff you!” I don’t get that. If you’re in show business and you’re doing well, just thank your lucky stars. Peoples’ lives are hard enough without having to see a lot of negative stuff. I think when people see you and you’re a comedian, the first thing you should do is be funny. They don’t want to hear you whine or complain. I mean, you’re a rich guy and you’re getting mad? Shut up.

JW: Where did that attitude come from?

JL: I think it’s probably a little bit from having Depression-era parents. My mom came to this country by herself when she was 11. It was rough for her, so I always try to keep that in perspective. When I started The Tonight Show, it was originally The Tonight Show Starring Jay Leno and my mother said, “Oh, starring! Mr. Big Shot!” She always used to make me feel so guilty. I changed it to The Tonight Show with Jay Leno just so my mother wouldn’t think I was trying to be a big shot. The real trick is to make show-business money and lead a normal life. I can’t impress anybody in show business, but I can fix a car. Then I go home and they say, “The big meatball is for Jay. Jay gets the big meatball!” That’s when I feel like a big shot.

]]>http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/08/29/in-the-magazine/features/jay-lenos-garage.html/feed0Has Wall Street Lost Its Luster?http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/06/20/in-the-magazine/features/has-wall-street-lost-its-luster.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/06/20/in-the-magazine/features/has-wall-street-lost-its-luster.html#commentsFri, 20 Jun 2014 13:00:58 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=100043In the aftermath of the Great Recession, fewer graduates of the nation's top schools are being drawn to the financial industry.

On a sunny fall Friday in 2012, hundreds of students flocked to the Dillon Gym for the Princeton Career Fair, an annual event that is attended by tech giants, Fortune 500 companies, and large nonprofit organizations.

I walked past orange-shirted career services workers, past booths set up by investment banks and consulting firms that came bearing slick banner displays and free golf balls, and into a phalanx of job-seeking students.

I was at Princeton to finish my investigation of young Wall Street recruits almost three years after I began it–on the campus of a top-flight university that sends a plurality of its graduates into the financial sector every year. I was curious about how the aftermath of the Great Recession had changed the way students at target schools saw the financial industry, and whether the same frantic desire to secure banking jobs still existed among them.

In Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis wrote that when Wall Street banks began recruiting at Princeton each year in the 1980s, the campus career center “resembled a ticket booth at a Michael Jackson concert, with lines of motley students staging all-night vigils to get ahead.” But at this year’s career fair, many of the most prestigious banks were no-shows.

There was no Goldman Sachs booth, no eager recruiters from Morgan Stanley or J.P. Morgan handing out key chains and Frisbees. The biggest names from Wall Street were Credit Suisse, Barclays Capital, the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, and a number of mid-sized hedge funds and private equity firms. Trumping them all was the Anheuser-Busch booth near the back of the gym, where Princeton alumni in red track jackets were giving out free, Budweiser-branded sunglasses under a sign that read: “Increase your liquid assets!”

The financial firms in attendance were using largely the same vague pitches I’d heard years earlier. One bank advertised its “global transaction advisory for the new economy.” Another offered students a chance to “bring your career into focus.” Jane Street Capital, a medium-sized hedge fund, had a banner promising its recruits a “dynamic, challenging environment. Rapid advancement. Idea-driven meritocracy. Informal fun and open atmosphere.” (Oh, and last on the list: “Generous compensation.”) I walked around the gym for an hour, listening to recruiters attempting to reel in students with time-tested come-ons:

“I love my job, and I love what I do.”

“Just because you don’t have a finance background doesn’t mean you won’t like the job.”

“It’s a total rush. Wouldn’t lie to you, dude. And even if it’s not for you long-term, it’s just two years.”

(The financial firm recruiting plan nicknamed “two and out” had a brilliant tactical move. Selling Wall Street jobs to undergraduates as a temporary commitment rather than a lifelong career enabled banks to attract a whole different breed of recruit — smart, ambitious college seniors who weren’t sure they wanted to be bankers but could be convinced to spend two years at a bank, gaining general business skills and adding a prestigious name to their résumés in preparation for their next moves. The strategy also created a generation of accidental financiers — people who had graduated from elite colleges with philosophy or history degrees, had no specific interest in or talent for high finance, yet found themselves still collecting paychecks from a big bank three decades later.)

But now most students didn’t seem to be jumping at the bait. Several of the ones I spoke to told me they weren’t interested in finance at all. A Princeton senior named Maxwell told me that he had once considered working at a bank, but had instead decided to pursue his dream of working in the sports industry.

“Look, I could work myself to the bone and make a lot of money in finance,” he said, “but I’ve known people who did that, and it’s not rewarding. In finance, you’re just playing around with numbers. I feel like, for me, it wouldn’t really be accomplishing anything besides making money. I would get bored.”

Other Princeton students I talked to said that while they were interested in finance, they didn’t want to work at just any big bank.

“I’m personally looking for a place that can promote economic development and growth in whatever industry it’s working in,” a junior named Shawn said. “I mean, everyone wants to make money. But when I’m working in the place, I want to know that I’m doing some good.”

I talked to dozens of Princeton students that day and found, to my surprise, that hardly any of them were gung-ho about becoming financiers. Many were applying for programs like Teach for America or AmeriCorps, and a significant number planned to go work for tech companies. I met aspiring accountants, management consultants, and graphic designers. And although I did meet a cadre of students who were planning to do two-year stints at a bank after graduation, they sounded apologetic about it. Many of them swore that they would leave Wall Street after their two years were up to do something “good” or “useful” or, barring that, “more fun.”

As I made my way back to the Princeton Junction train station that day, I found myself trying to envision what Wall Street will look like 10 years from now, when students like these have had a chance to settle into their careers and the finance industry has fully absorbed the shocks of the 2008 crisis. And I came up with three predictions.

Find out what Kevin Roose predicts for the future of Wall Street and how the financial industry will adapt post-recession! Pick up the July/August 2014 issue of The Saturday Evening Post on newsstands, or…

Purchase the digital edition for your iPad, Nook, or Android tablet:

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]]>http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/06/20/in-the-magazine/features/has-wall-street-lost-its-luster.html/feed0Van Gogh’s Hollandhttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/06/20/in-the-magazine/features/van-goghs-holland.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/06/20/in-the-magazine/features/van-goghs-holland.html#commentsFri, 20 Jun 2014 13:00:43 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=99711 Most of what we think we know about the artist has to do with his tumultuous years in France, but, increasingly, the Dutch are reclaiming Van Gogh as their own.

“Drenthe is so beautiful,” Van Gogh wrote of the Dutch province, “it absorbs and fulfills me so utterly that, if I couldn’t stay here forever, I would rather not have seen it at all. It’s inexpressibly beautiful.” Photo source: Shutterstock.com

Some deaths are such cultural touchstones that they become imprinted on our own memories too, like a personal tragedy. That, at least, is the case with Vincent van Gogh. Our collective image of the artist’s last morning, slashing away at a canvas in that Provençal wheat field, the angry crows wheeling above like a beaky Greek chorus, the brooding sky watching as he puts the gun to his stomach, makes for an almost operatic vision. Few endings are as poetic or fitting; we remember Van Gogh’s masterworks but it’s his apotheosis as the artist-turned-ultimate outsider, and sacrificial lamb, that shapes his legend.

The irony of course is that the man famous for his lyrical death adamantly refuses to die. In fact he keeps popping up again and again, and the resurrections seem to be escalating. In the last several years Van Gogh has resurfaced almost monthly in the news. First there was the 2011 biography, Van Gogh: The Life by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, that claimed his death wasn’t suicide but murder, committed by a bullying, gun-happy teenager.

Then there was the report that his famously blue The Bedroom was never meant to be blue at all; the original palette, researchers discovered, was a violet that changed color because the artist was using cheap, unstable pigment. And then there was the news, in 2013, that the painting Sunset at Montmajour, once rejected as an obviously kitsch, phony forgery, had been reclaimed. Curators at the Van Gogh Museum, giving it a closer look, called it an authentic canvas by the master, suggesting that maybe more Van Goghs are waiting to come tumbling out of some attic, adding to a legacy that keeps growing, changing shape, and just won’t sit still.

All of these new takes on Van Gogh and his art, though, may be eclipsed by a bigger revelation, a reinvention of sorts. The artist, it turns out, was a Dutchman. This of course seems like an obvious epiphany. But most of what we think we know about Van Gogh relates to his French years in Provence, and in the popular imagination the artist–despite that classically guttural Dutch name–has become so Gallic, he has morphed into a flâneur wearing a beret, chomping on a baguette. When people talk about following in Van Gogh’s footsteps they typically mean the paint-splattered circuits around Arles, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, and Auvers-sur-Oise, a route that the French, absconding with the Dutchman, have wisely turned into a tourist attraction.

But the Dutch are reasserting their own claim. They see Van Gogh not as some Frenchified savant, but as an emphatically homegrown master painter firmly grounded in their spongy, lowland soil. It’s a chauvinistic reclamation that I embrace like any true Dutch-ophile. Blame it on a personal kind of patriotism. My family moved to Holland when I was 4 years old, and the dreamscape of humpbacked bridges and tilting gabled houses looked like the antidote to the anodyne American suburb we left behind.

And although we came back to that suburb a few years later, my Dutch ardor has only grown over the years on frequent return visits to Holland. So it’s heartening to see my own swelling Dutch pride echoed by the country itself. Tired of being cast as a pit stop on every stoners’ year abroad, the Netherlands is focusing on its richer, truer cultural history.

The zealous renovation of Amsterdam’s trifecta of art museums that frame the city’s Museumplein underscores that rediscovery. The contemporary Stedelijk Museum, the Van Gogh Museum, and the Rijksmuseum all reopened, after the city invested millions of dollars in their refurbishment. It is the Rijkmuseum that is winning the most attention for its sleekly reformatted powerhouse galleries that make the case for rediscovering the Dutch masters, those peerless Vermeers and Rembrandts lining the Gallery of Honor.

It’s an easy case to make. Those 17th-century works, the very definitions of masterpieces, remind us that while their European counterparts were still painting fussy royal portraits and martyred saints, Dutch artists, commissioned by more pragmatic burghers, were capturing the beauty of our sensual, earthly world. As the first true modernists, they saw the physical radiance of our everyday, purely human landscape: the parrot tulip and string of pearls; a canal lit by golden lowland sun; and the quietude of a cobbled courtyard.

But it is the Van Gogh Museum that may, in the end, make just as radical a point, arguing for the pioneering force of Dutch art, by refocusing our distracted gaze on a more fully realized Van Gogh. He isn’t just the maestro of Arles in this gallery, but the man who came of age and discovered his artistic, outlier’s voice as a Dutchman.

]]>http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/06/20/in-the-magazine/features/van-goghs-holland.html/feed0A New American Isolationism?http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/06/20/history/post-perspective/a-new-american-isolationism.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/06/20/history/post-perspective/a-new-american-isolationism.html#commentsFri, 20 Jun 2014 13:00:25 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=99730For the vast mass of the American people, getting out of military entanglements is now the expectation rather than some vague hope.

From the archive: J.C Leyendecker’s 1942 New Year’s Baby reflected the anxiety felt by the American public as we dropped our isolationist stance and prepared for war.

For the past century, the United States has frequently gone to war in the interests of freedom and democracy–often with the unstated (but not necessarily secondary) purpose of protecting our sources of oil or for access to populations who would buy our goods or services.

But the costs lately have become overwhelming, whether measured in cold, hard cash or in lives lost. America has lost its appetite to serve as policeman in the earth’s most horrific trouble spots. We just want to be left alone.

March 2014 marked the first month in more than a decade without a single American combat casualty anywhere in the world. For the vast mass of the American people, getting out of military entanglements is now the expectation rather than some vague hope. After two wars stretching back 13 years, American sentiment has once again tilted toward the isolationism that marked the end of the First World War. “[That conflict] was followed in the ’20s and ’30s by something that…was in fact a rejection of a certain role in the world,” says Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution and a foreign policy advisor to Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign. “It wasn’t just, ‘Let’s have a little time out here.’ It was, ‘We are not going to be doing that.’”

In fact, it would take a challenge to our very way of life–in the form of Hitler, Mussolini, and that dastardly backdoor attack on Pearl Harbor–to draw us into World War II. And we never really emerged. The Korean War followed just a few years afterward, then it was on into Vietnam, and almost before we all realized what happened, we were on to the Balkans and Sarajevo; the Middle East, Iraq and Afghanistan; and now there’s Syria and Crimea and Ukraine.

And each such adventure has its own price tag. Iraq, a country from which we have already technically departed, is still costing us $3 billion per year. The overall Department of Defense budget totals some $496 billion, or 13.6 percent of the total federal budget today–and that’s with a rapidly shrinking military.

Compare these numbers to those of the Korean War, which cost us $30 billion ($262 billion in today’s dollars) or less than one-third of the cost of the post-9/11 war on terror that includes Iraq and Afghanistan, which the non-partisan Congressional Research Service puts at $859 billion.

With 20/20 hindsight, it’s beginning to look increasingly like our all but universally accepted role as the world’s policeman really peaked sometime during the Korean War. Then began a long, slow descent, largely perceptible only to the most astute observers positioned outside the Beltway. When John F. Kennedy sent us swaggering into the Indochina Wars at the very moment a far more nimble Charles de Gaulle was already extricating France, we were still operating under the assumption that America somehow had a higher calling we needed to fulfill. It seemed only America had the might, and the moral will, to prevent the rapid spread of that evil virus called communism across Indochina, into Thailand, down the Malay Peninsula and across Southeast Asia.

As it happens, I was present as a journalist to witness the final days of America’s foray into Southeast Asia. The final days and weeks of the takeover of Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge were not amusing. Seeing the conflict at this late stage, one forgot the original point of the American mission, to serve in a police capacity in this region.

But was that even an appropriate use of American power and influence? Neither in Korea nor in Vietnam nor in any other police action since–certainly not in Afghanistan or Iraq–has America had the kind of influence over the outcome envisioned at the start of our engagement. Our role was always presented to the public as a limited exercise: Act the role of the good cop, oust the bad guys, clap them in jail, then get the heck out of Dodge.

Of course, it’s never quite worked that way, and we have never learned our lesson. The failure derives not from a lack of good faith, but rather from a lack of vision. When we entered each of these rabbit holes, we never had a real understanding of how we’d emerge. As is clear now, the end game is in most respects far more significant than the entry point.

But if the American people have come full circle in the past century, arriving today at a reluctance for combat that mirrors post-World War I isolationism, many nations still look to the U.S. to play the role of global cop–if only because no other nation has the might or the will to play such a role. “I fear that what is going on now is that Americans are quite understandably not only tired of the burden, but they no longer understand the reasons why we even took on this burden in the first place,” Kagan says.

About those reasons: Sixty years ago, The Saturday Evening Post article “Can We Remake the World Without Going Broke?” observed that the nation’s Mutual Security Program, newly signed into law by Truman with bipartisan support in Congress, was staking the future of the American economy upon “the hope of revolutionizing the non-Soviet world.”

The piece continued: “This program pushes American military frontiers far out into Europe, Asia, and Africa. It consolidates an American pattern for reorganization of the entire non-Soviet world through combined military, economic, financial, and social measures.…It appeals to those who believe that ‘sharing our wealth’ is speeding up some form of world government.…On the other side, it appalls those Americans who are chiefly concerned with the radical changes which ‘mutual security’ means for the American traditional system: indefinite conscription of our young men, Federal expenditures greatly in excess of revenues, unparalleled taxes which are certain to increase, the overhanging threat of monetary inflation which already has reduced the purchasing power of the dollar by more than half.” (For more selections from the Post archive, see page 37.)

As summer kicks in, Americans get a little grill-crazy. Something about smoke and smell and sounds of outdoor cooking triggers a mass migration to the backyard. On that, we all agree.

But when it comes to who mans the grill, the genders divide. In the U.S., we hold one truth to be self-evident, that man is keeper of the flame, master of the pit, guru of the grate.

“I’m a man. Men cook outside. That outdoor grilling is a manly pursuit has long been beyond question,” wrote Bill Geist, CBS Sunday Morning correspondent.

“If this wasn’t understood, you’d never get grown men to put on those aprons with pictures of dancing weenies on the front, and messages like ‘Come ’n’ Get It!’”

No matter who wears the apron in your home, even accomplished pit masters need to step it up at times. To upgrade your grill skills, the Post invited celebrity chefs to offer alternatives to burgers and hotdogs. We think you’ll love the result. (And your neighbors will be impressed.)

“My dad and I would play imaginary games, pitching to imaginary hitters, calling balls and strikes as we threw the ball back and forth. I think it’s the nicest memory I have of being with my dad.” Photo source: Shutterstock.com

Though I live in Los Angeles, my wife and I rarely venture into Beverly Hills. I have very little to look at in these posh palaces of luxury, and thankfully my wife, who is a weaver, prefers to make her own clothing. But she does like Coach bags, and there happens to be a Coach store on Rodeo Drive.

What surprised me when we looked at their window display was a baseball theme, with two-color bats and some multi-colored leather baseball gloves (orange/white, squash/fawn, navy/turquoise).

Inside, in the back of the store, is a small department for men. And sure enough, among the baseball beanbag paperweights and baseball-leather wallets, were some smooth leather baseball gloves that brought back a flood of childhood memories when I slid my hand into one. Good God, I thought, this was my Proustian madeleine.

I remembered Little League tryouts when I was 11 years old. The tryouts were meant to determine which boys would play in the Majors. I was a skinny kid, not very tall or strong, and I clearly belonged in the Minors; but when one of the coaches hit a fly ball to me, I chased it down in the outfield and somehow miraculously caught it. That ruined my chance to play much that summer.

I was put in the Majors, along with boys two and three years older than me where I sat on the bench, waiting to be tapped to pinch run or to play the last inning of a losing game. But still, a memory that I hold most dear is of that special catch during tryouts. The long run on the outfield grass, the hardball arcing over my head, my outstretched left arm, the ball landing in the deep pocket with a thwunk! and the look on everyone’s face when it didn’t drop out of my glove.

As my wife browsed bags, I tried on and pounded a stunning navy/turquoise leather glove. I remembered our junior varsity team in high school. I was 13, playing second base, and I convinced my dad that I needed a new infielder’s mitt. We went to a sporting goods store and I found a nice golden Spalding glove with the name Sam Esposito scrawled in the pocket. Esposito was a utility infielder for the Chicago White Sox in 1952, and from 1955–63. He had a lifetime batting average of .207 and hit just eight home runs in 10 years, so he wasn’t a major league ballplayer for his bat. His fielding percentage was .957. Esposito was a glove man.
I was a die-hard Yankee fan, so I didn’t really follow Sam Esposito, but I liked the glove and have never forgotten his name.

Nor have I forgotten when Mr. Morelli, our junior varsity head coach, decided to move me from second to first. “You need to get a first baseman’s mitt,” he told me. When I protested that I had just got my Sam Esposito infielder’s glove, he said, “You can’t be a first baseman with a glove like that. If you don’t get the right glove, I’ll have to bench you.” Those are cruel words to say to a fledgling ballplayer who had dreams of turning spectacular double plays and not fearing line drives. My dad had paid $29 for that glove. I knew I couldn’t tell him I needed another one, so I stuck to my guns and insisted I could play first base with the glove I had. Mr. Morelli stuck to his guns as well and put another kid at first.

This led to thoughts of my dad. Having a catch was one of the things we did in our backyard on weekends. He was a lefty, so he had an old mitt that couldn’t be passed down. We would play imaginary games, pitching to imaginary hitters, calling balls and strikes as we threw the ball back and forth. I think it’s the nicest memory I have of being with my dad. And just sticking a glove on my hand brought this back to me. If memory can be triggered so powerfully by something this simple, maybe it was worth forking over $348 to buy the glove.

To read the rest of this essay by Lawrence Grobel, pick up the July/August 2014 issue of The Saturday Evening Post on newsstands, or…

Purchase the digital edition for your iPad, Nook, or Android tablet:

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]]>http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/06/20/in-the-magazine/features/having-a-catch.html/feed2America’s Weather Obsessionhttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/04/18/in-the-magazine/features/americas-weather-obsession.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/04/18/in-the-magazine/features/americas-weather-obsession.html#commentsFri, 18 Apr 2014 13:00:18 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=98771Talk of rain, wind, clouds—even sunshine—dominates the news today, even though we are insulated from all but the most extreme weather. What’s behind the fascination with forces beyond our control?

JUST WHY DOES JIM CANTORE RISK LIFE AND LIMB TO REPORT LIVE FROM THE FRONT LINE OF SEVERE WEATHER EVENTS?

His answer is simple: “I want the ball.” For The Weather Channel storm tracker, famous for being buffeted, pelted, and drenched on the air, confronting a hurricane or blizzard is like suiting up for the big game. “When you’re in the Super Bowl, you want to score the winning touchdown, catch the winning pass, kick the winning field goal,” he explains.

Score one for the weather team. In Cantore you have science and show business all wrapped up in one spiffy Gore-Tex package. A highly trained, telegenic broadcast meteorologist facing down danger in HD in order to inform and protect you and me. And according to his boss David Kenny, the CEO of The Weather Company (The Weather Channel is one of many “brands” under The Weather Company umbrella, but more on that later), that’s exactly what Americans now want and expect.

“People want to see what’s going on. They don’t want the map,” he says. “They want to feel the power of the weather.”

Folks, we’ve come a long, long way from forecasts drawn with markers on plexiglass over a Rand McNally map. “Technology has brought the weather into our living rooms,” says Cantore. “Now you’re watching it in high-definition, unthinkable images. That’s what weather is today: the quintessential reality TV.”

In other words, it’s entertainment. Albeit, entertainment with life and death consequences for those sitting in the path of a Category 4 hurricane or an EF5 tornado. A hybrid of entertainment and public service that seemingly weather-obsessed Americans can’t get enough of these days. And for good reason, suggests Kenny: “It’s storytelling, and weather stories have a kind of drama, a contest between man and Mother Nature. People are interested in that. They want the humans to win.”

IN HIS DELIGHTFUL AND INSTRUCTIVEWeather Book, the late Eric Sloane wrote, “The weather is with us wherever we are, yet nothing is more taken for granted than the daily drama of the sky.” Sloane was spot-on about the ubiquity of weather in our lives. From what to wear to when to plant, the morning commute to the price of food, weather affects us in myriad ways in the short term and the long term. But Sloane was writing in 1949, the dawn of television meteorology, and his second observation, that nothing is more taken for granted, doesn’t hold true today.

Perhaps you’ve noticed how the weather almost always leads the local news; how it is promo’d during the broadcast day and in between scheduled programs; how on the morning, noon, evening, and night news the forecast is dished out in two-minute increments, like appetizers, amid the rest of the hour’s reports; how meteorologists withhold the complete seven-day forecast until the end of the show (“more on that in just a few minutes”), all the while animatedly tracking and analyzing pressure fronts and precipitation from every angle and direction on chroma-keyed color Super Doppler radar graphics that shift back and forth behind them. It may be a sunny day without a cloud in the sky, and half the news program is still devoted to the weather.

Not surprisingly, there’s a reason for this beyond a simple desire to keep the viewers informed. The television business is a constant quest for eyeballs, and weather delivers them. “We know from research all across the country that weather content is a key driver for consumption of news of any kind,” says Laura Clark, senior vice president at Frank N. Magid Associates, a prestigious consulting firm that has advised local and national media for 57 years. “Of course, severe weather is even more of a driver.”

Which means, if it wasn’t for weather, local news programs could find themselves tanking in ratings. But it’s not as though viewers were coming for the news anyway; weather was the top reason given for tuning into local news 80 to 90 percent of the time in a Magid study. What’s more, a station’s chief meteorologist can be the most popular talent on the air, with a large, loyal following, especially in markets along Tornado Alley or the Gulf Coast, where weather can be life or death. All good reasons to keep those long-range forecasts and cutting-edge graphics coming, and coming, and coming.

AS IT IS, LOCAL NEWS STATIONS and weathercasters are scrambling to keep up with the times and demand. Thanks to digital technology, the means of accessing and delivering the weather are changing, expanding. Nowadays, there are websites, smartphones, mobile apps, blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, all being employed to satisfy a seemingly unquenchable demand for weather news.

Nobody understands this better than James Spann at ABC 33/40 in Birmingham, Alabama. An Emmy Award-winning broadcast meteorologist who was named Broadcaster of the Year by the National Weather Association (NWA) in 2012, Spann has covered severe tornadoes, hurricanes, and floods in his 35-year television career. He also now blogs, tweets, and hosts a popular weekly podcast, WeatherBrains. “The times have changed–just like the print business–so we have to deliver weather across a variety of digital platforms in different ways,” he says.

License to Chill: Meteorologist Jim Cantore has experienced quite a few extremes in his 28 years at The Weather Channel. Photo courtesy The Weather Channel

According to Spann, the ABC 33/40 Weather Blog has “gone over 2 million page views in a 24-hour period multiple times.” In addition, he boasts 124,435 Twitter followers and 149,112 Facebook “likes.”

“There’s a really good chance that I’m reaching more people on social media than television on a normal day, which is mind boggling,” he says.

“If you’d told me that five years ago, I would have said you’re crazy.”

Here’s another number to consider: 300 billion. According to a nationwide survey conducted in 2006 and released in 2009 by NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research) in Boulder, Colorado, adults in America obtain an estimated 300 billion weather forecasts, an average of 3.8 forecasts a day per person. “What we found is that weather permeates almost everybody’s lives, it is kind of like an infrastructure,” says project lead Jeff Lazo. “Weather information is a fundamental thing, we use it multiple times every single time. So it really is ubiquitous.”

Now keep in mind that this survey was conducted in 2006, before the boom in smartphones, apps, and social media. “We didn’t ask them about Twitter and Facebook and stuff, because those didn’t really exist as much then,” says Lazo. Aware that a sea change was underway, NCAR conducted a second survey in 2010. NCAR associate scientist Julie Demuth is currently crunching the numbers on that report, but she ventures that it’ll show a definite uptick in the use of smartphones and the like to obtain forecasts.

As the weathercaster would say: Stay tuned for that report. It should be an invaluable window into our weather-watching habits.

SO, WHAT IS IT WITH AMERICANS AND WEATHER? How did it become a life-and-death entertainment, a mix of science and show business that enthralls us, the ultimate reality television, an indispensable part of our lives? Let’s step into the Wayback Machine for a quick whirl through weather, American style.

To read the rest of this article, and to see a bonus gallery of weather-related Post covers by artists like Norman Rockwell, Coby Whitmore, and George Hughes, pick up the May/June 2014 issue of The Saturday Evening Post on newsstands, or…

Purchase the digital edition for your iPad, Nook, or Android tablet:

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]]>http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/04/18/in-the-magazine/features/americas-weather-obsession.html/feed0Lost in Kinsalehttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/04/18/in-the-magazine/features/lost-in-kinsale.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/04/18/in-the-magazine/features/lost-in-kinsale.html#commentsFri, 18 Apr 2014 13:00:05 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=98755How a side trip to a tiny Irish village helped an American couple get reacquainted.

And why shouldn’t I go to Kinsale? says Jan as we cross over the River Liffey for the third, maybe the fourth time, muddling our way out of Dublin in our wee rental car. What occurred there was years ago, says she.

I don’t ever think about it.

I’m just saying we don’t have to go there, says I. We could go to Cork. Or Galway.

Worst idea I’ve ever had, this side trip to Kinsale. A lovely week in Dublin, getting things between us back on track, and then this idjit–me–suggests renting a car and driving down to Kinsale. You’ll love it, says I. Very romantic. Gawd, what an arse.

Watch the road now! yells Jan. You’re crossing the line again!

I will yeah, thanks, says I sarcastically.

Silence the rest of the way.

We pull into Kinsale five hours later, eventually find our hotel, and, though worn out, decide before dinner to go for a walk just to get out of the room. It’s a fine summer evening. Calm, brisk, moist. Seagulls swoop through a pale blue sky. Children play along the low wall of the harbor. An older gent sitting in a sunken lawn chair on the bow of his decrepit sailboat sips a whiskey. Red face, purple nose, threadbare sweater the color of new hay. Drinking by himself. Still. Not a half-bad life.

I wouldn’t mind doing something like that, I say, trying to make peace.

Not with me, says Jan. I could never live on a boat. Everything damp, wet. Closed quarters.

Anyway, the drink looks inviting, I say. Shall we find a bar before dinner? Jan shrugs.

On the corner is a white building with a little mural of a waiter in black vest and bow tie carrying a glass of wine. Apéritif, says the sign. Pop in. Nice-looking place. But nobody here. What time is it, anyway? After five. When do they start drinking in Kinsale?

The lone woman inside, standing behind the bar holding a glass of white wine, has the most shocking bright red hair I’ve ever seen. The color of a candy apple. Pale, freckled skin. Maybe 40. Maybe 50. Never good at guessing women’s ages. Twinkle in her green eyes.

Do you serve wine by the glass? I ask.

We’d better; we’re a wine bar, she says, laughing. Sticks her thin, pale hand out. Kate, she says. I run the place, although there’s not much to run at the moment. Laughs at her own joke, takes a sip of wine.
What is it you’re drinking? I ask her.

Pinot gris. It’s not much but it’s all right. Fancy a glass?

Why not.

Kate grabs a bottle stuck in a tub of ice and gives us hefty pours.

Awfully quiet in town, I say.

It’s a bit early, says Kate. Not for me, of course, she says, sipping her wine. Where are you from then?

California, says Jan.

I love California, says Kate. Palm Springs! Lived there for a year with husband No. 2. Or maybe it was No. 3. Doesn’t matter, does it!

This brings a smile to Jan’s face. The three of us get to talking and suddenly Jan is telling stories about how I got us lost today just looking for our hotel in town, even though you could walk the whole thing from one end to the other in 10 minutes. Kate laughs and slaps the bar. Says, I don’t believe you! Lost in Kinsale?

It’s true, it’s true, says Jan and the two of them look at me and laugh, conspirators already. We finish our drinks and I ask for the bill. Kate grabs the bottle of wine from behind the bar and says, Let me just top this off a bit–on the house. What are you doing in Kinsale, then?

We came to Dublin to celebrate our anniversary, says Jan. Then this one decided we should come to Kinsale because he once met a girl here.

No! says Kate. I don’t believe you!

It’s true, says Jan. Kate makes a horrified face and shakes her head. Oh, I don’t mind, says Jan. It’s nothing to me.
I tell Jan we should probably be going. Kate puts a hand on top of Jan’s arm and tops off both of our glasses again.
More stories pass between Jan and Kate. More wine. An hour later I tell Kate we really do have to go or I’ll never make it through dinner since I’m already half-sozzled.

Oh, that’s a good one, isn’t it? says Kate. Sozzled! Haven’t heard that in ages! Listen, she says, giving Jan a long hug, if you haven’t anything to do after dinner, there’s a trad session at Daltons tonight. Good craic. You might even find me there.

What’s a trad session? asks Jan.

Traditional Irish music. The real thing. Not something brought in for tourists. Good craic, she says again.

Damn if I can understand how it is I keep getting us lost in a small town where I spent an entire summer. We walk up a hill over the harbor, neighbors sitting on their stoops smoking a fag or just enjoying the fine evening. I ask one old gent taking the air how to get to Max’s restaurant. Down them stoney steps, he says. Pass that house there.

I thought you knew this town? says Jan.

I did then, says I. Now I’m a bit lost.

To find out how Jan and David’s evening in Kinsale ended, and to see more beautiful pictures from their trip to this small Irish village, pick up the May/June 2014 issue of The Saturday Evening Post on newsstands, or…

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People who eat breakfast at least four days a week have a significantly lower risk of type 2 diabetes, along with a lower chance of obesity and high blood pressure. (Shutterstock)

S
helley Kubaney didn’t know what was wrong. For months, the 45-year-old oncology nurse from Fairview, Pennsylvania, had not been herself. For starters, she was exhausted. After a day at work it was all she could do to flop into bed where she slept for hours. In addition to relentless fatigue, she started to experience blurriness on the fringe of her vision. It got so bad that she could hardly drive at night when the glare of headlights compounded the problem.

After Kubaney made several trips to different doctors, her perplexed primary care physician ordered a full range of blood tests in February. The results delivered unexpected news—she had type 2 diabetes.

“I was completely stunned,” says Kubaney, a married mom of two teenagers. Stunned because she had no family history of the disease and she considered herself to be in decent shape and was not significantly overweight—all factors that typically play a role in developing type 2 diabetes. Yet as Kubaney quickly learned more about the disease and how it manifests over time, she became convinced that some simple lifestyle changes might have prevented or delayed the onset of full-blown diabetes.

“It was definitely a wakeup call,” she says. “I don’t really like meat and vegetables, so what does that leave? Carbs and sugar. I let myself cry for one night and then the next morning started a new way of eating and living.”

For many of us, diabetes lurks in the shadows, waiting to strike. The number of Americans with diabetes increased from 5.6 million in 1980 to 20.9 million in 2011, according to the CDC. Experts predict it will only get worse. The American Diabetes Association says 26 million adults and children are living with diabetes today. Another 79 million Americans are pre-diabetic, and likely headed for the full-blown disease unless they take swift action to change their health and nutrition habits.

It’s a fate worth avoiding.

Once diagnosed, your risk of heart attack and stroke jumps by more than 50 percent. You’re vulnerable to the leading cause of blindness among adults. And, if diabetes is not managed effectively, your day-to-day quality of life will decline as you grapple with fatigue, blurred vision, more-frequent infections, and slow-healing sores.

Yet, the latest research lays the foundation for a simple diabetes prevention plan that doesn’t require hours at the gym or drastic diet changes. The steps are easy–starting with a healthy breakfast and ending with a good night’s sleep. Taken together, the approach can go a long way toward avoiding diabetes or—if you already have it—managing the disease.

“Ten years ago people would come into a bar and order vodka. Now we have people coming in and naming the brand of bourbon they want in a Manhattan.” — Rich Ruth, former co-owner of Sidebar at Whiskey Row

Given that Dominic Roskrow is from the U.K., he might seem an unlikely advocate of American whiskey. “Yours is made to a vastly higher standard than Scotch,” says Dominic, author of The World’s Best Whiskies and editor of Whiskeria, Britain’s largest whiskey magazine. “There are rules governing what’s in the bottle, which we don’t have in Scotland. You have something really, really special. But makers of American whiskey haven’t been good at telling its story, which is amazing considering how loud and aggressive Americans can be.”

I decide to let this backhanded compliment slide, since Dominic has been such good company for the past few days and is so enthusiastic about our culture in general. We had met prior to our guided tour of America’s whiskey trail at a hotel bar in Nashville, Tennessee, where, to get in the spirit, we’d sampled several flights of Jack Daniel’s. We started with the Old No. 7, then Single Barrel and Gentleman Jack—and along the way discovered our common enthusiasm for quality spirits. While Dominic rhapsodized about America and the quality of its water and distilleries, we drifted figuratively from the deep smoky forests of Tennessee to the rolling, bluegrass-clad horse country of Kentucky, moving up the map like vapors of alcohol rising through a copper still.

Has America failed to tell its whiskey story? Well, someone’s getting the word out. Sales of super-premium American whiskies have doubled in five years while exports of U.S. spirits of all kinds have doubled over 10. And in recent years, the most storied brands have been joined by artisanal distillers from Florida to Alaska. There are now some 250 regional small-batch distillers compared with fewer than 50, 10 years ago.

“I don’t think there’s any question that we’re in bourbon’s heyday,” says Rich Ruth, former co-owner of Sidebar at Whiskey Row, a restaurant-bar in Louisville. “Ten years ago people would come into a bar and order vodka. Now we have people coming in and naming the brand of bourbon they want in a Manhattan.”

If that sounds like a contemporary trend, well, it may well be. But American whiskey is anything but trendy in the here-today-gone-tomorrow sense of the word. Indeed, whiskey (usually spelled without an “e” on the other side of the pond) has deep roots in American history. To tell the story, the Distilled Spirits Council mapped a route it calls the American Whiskey Trail that runs in an arc from Washington, D.C., through Pennsylvania and Kentucky into Tennessee, and Dominic and I and a few other passionate whiskey-philes set out to follow it.

To find out which distilleries produce some of the best and most popular whiskies in the U.S., pick up the March/April 2014 issue of The Saturday Evening Post on newsstands, or

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Ted Key was born Theodore Keyser in 1912. By the middle of the 20th century, his Hazel cartoons were arguably the most popular single feature in The Saturday Evening Post, better known even than Norman Rockwell’s famous illustrations.

In 1961, Hazel was transformed into a TV show that ran for five seasons with Shirley Booth in the lead role.

Not just a cartoonist, Ted Key wrote the stories for three Disney movies and the script for one, The Cat from Outer Space; he wrote four children’s books, one of which was made into the movie Digby, the Biggest Dog in the World; and he created a long-running series of inspirational posters for corporate clients.

Along the way, Key invented a raft of lovable characters, from Diz and Liz–featured in a long-running cartoon in Jack and Jill magazine, a sister publication to the Post–to Johnny Daydream and his pet Beware the Dog. If you haven’t heard of the latter, it’s because by the time they aired on television in 1959 as part of Rocky and His Friends they had become Mr. Peabody (the time-traveling dog scientist) and Sherman (his adopted boy). The pair soon gained their own cult following and hit the big screen earlier this spring in DreamWorks Animation’s Mr. Peabody & Sherman.

Ted Key passed away in 2008, but his wit and his characters occupy a permanent place in our collective memory. Late last winter, The Saturday Evening Post met with Peter Key, the youngest of Ted’s three sons, to ask about life with his famous dad.

The Saturday Evening Post: As your dad once wrote, he wasn’t really proud of Hazel as she first appeared, but she morphed into something wonderful. Can you recall her evolution?Peter Key: Well, this happened before I was born. But he always said the idea came to him in a dream. At first, Hazel was skinny and not too bright, the kind of maid that got everything wrong. The cartoons worked; they sold right away. But he didn’t like her being stupid. Gradually she got smarter and more full-figured. And in the process, Hazel became a much more interesting and endearing creature.

SEP: What does this say about your dad?PK: He truly was a very nice guy. He seemed to get along with everyone. He would chat up bank tellers, people at the post office, the mailman.

SEP: No dark side at all?PK: I remember him getting angry at stupid stuff we kids would do. But, no, he really didn’t have a dark side.

SEP: Where did the name Hazel come from?PK: My dad maintained that the name Hazel came “out of the blue.” But, funny story, he later found out that Bob Fuoss, then the managing editor of the Post, was given the silent treatment by his sister for three years when the cartoon first started running. Her name was Hazel, and she thought Fuoss had selected the name to ridicule her.

SEP: Your father worked for the Post for many years. Did he ever meet Norman Rockwell?PK: For a few years, he submitted ideas to the Post for Rockwell covers.

SEP: Were his ideas used?PK: Well, yes, but Rockwell didn’t like having cover ideas dictated to him. So, it was a bit of a dance. My father would sell cover concepts to Ken Stuart, the art editor at the time. Then Stuart would call Rockwell and ask him what he was working on. Rockwell would tend to say he had several projects going, but if he wasn’t specific, Stuart would run my dad’s ideas by him, and typically Rockwell would reject them all. Then a few weeks later Stuart would call Rockwell and again ask what he was working on. Rockwell would say, “Oh I have this great idea!” and it would be one of my dad’s concepts. In fairness, Rockwell always made these ideas his own.

To read the rest of Peter Key’s interview, see original Hazel cartoons, and find out how Peter’s following in his father’s footsteps, pick up the May/June 2014 issue of The Saturday Evening Post on newsstands, or…

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Sean Reavie stared in disbelief at the unexpected email in his inbox. Could he really turn his life around this late in the game? Was this the miracle he’d been wishing for or just another false hope?

He was approaching 40, alone, in debt, financially and emotionally bankrupt. His dream of being a police officer had loomed in front of him, unreachable, for so long. At times, he’d been close, but he’d never quite made it. Was it possible that this time would be different?

It would take a whole lot of faith and a whole lot of hard work to find out.

Sean grew up in tiny St. Ignace, Michigan, with a banker father and a homemaker mother. It was there Sean had an experience that would alter his life. It was a seemingly small thing: His dad’s friend, Paul Sved, a Michigan State Trooper, drove Sean’s father home from work in his police car. Sean was an impressionable 5-year-old, and he was smitten. “The car, the lights, the uniform–it was so exciting to meet this larger-than-life hero in the flesh. Here was a man who was ready to put himself between a total stranger and harm’s way. That very day, I made a pledge to Paul that I would follow in his footsteps.”

Many young boys dream of becoming policemen or firemen or pilots. Then, well, most of them grow up and develop other interests. Sean was different. He held onto his vision for years. Until, that is, a well-intentioned high school English teacher squashed it. The teacher argued that he had natural writing talent and owed it to himself to put it to good use. “Don’t waste your talent being a police officer,” she told Sean.

Swayed by her logic, he put the dream aside. But still, “She broke my heart,” he says. He would ultimately earn a journalism degree from Central Michigan University. Soon after, he would take a job as a reporter and marry. But his heart really wasn’t in the job or the marriage. “Nothing in my life was satisfying me back then,” Sean recalls. “So I just kept looking, hoping eventually something would click.”

He quit that job and took another, but nothing felt right. That’s when he realized he’d never really given up his childhood wish. He still wanted to be a cop.

This time it was his wife who talked him out of it. “She thought it was too dangerous,” Sean explains. “I was trying to make the marriage work, so I agreed not to pursue it. But I was so unhappy. Every time a police car passed, I knew that’s where I belonged. It eventually took its toll on our marriage.”

After the couple split in 1999, Sean was ready to start fresh. There was nothing to stop him now, so he took the test for the Michigan State Police and passed with flying colors. But then, incredibly, just as he was supposed to start his training, a hiring freeze went into effect. “It was so crushing,” Sean reveals. “To be so close and have it disappear.”

A girlfriend convinced him a fortune could be made in the mortgage business. “I thought that would fill this void in my life,” recalls Sean. “But, of course, money can never do that.”